Between Two Fires (9781101611616) (23 page)

Rather, let him look back at me if there are no devils in him.

The boy did look back over his shoulder at him. Just once, and only for an instant, but it was enough.

He would always think of it as having started that day.

*  *  *

Each night became a battle for Matthieu Hanicotte. He was in danger of losing his belief, if not his soul. Were there souls at all? Was there really a naked, invisible little version of himself hiding under his skin, so valuable to Heaven and Hell that each would send emissaries down to fight for it?

He started by telling himself he would not drink more than one cup of wine, then two, and then three, lest he should become drunk and give himself up to thinking about those red legs. In the end his head was reeling, he was spent, dry-mouthed from spitting in his hand, and he lay in his shame and guilt until the small hours of the morning.

The days were better; even though his parishioners began to ask after his health because he had lost weight and had bags under his eyes, he was far less miserable ministering to them than lying alone with his thoughts. It was better to counsel fat, bearded Sanson Bertier to apologize to his wife for menacing her with his billhook, and to smell the farts Bertier would gravely fan away with his straw hat; it was better to walk with his box of holies out to give last rites to Clement Fougière three times in one week only to have him get well; it was even better to be bitten by Fougière’s dog on the last visit and hear the old man laugh from his sickbed.

One night near the end of May, he went down to the river and walked along its banks, enjoying the pleasantly cool air and getting lost in the beauty of the sky, where the moon was veiling herself with gauzy, fast-moving clouds. She was not full, but she was bright enough to illuminate the river, sending cloud shadows racing over the water and the willows near this part of the bank.

It was near one of these willows that a bright swath of moonlight dragged itself over a set of cast-aside clothes. Père Matthieu could not resist peeking at the river, where he was sure he would spy a bather. He was not disappointed. In fact, there were two of them, and much closer than the clothes.

Seeing him, a girl inexpertly stifled a squeal, then thrashed out of
the water, covering her breasts and running for her homespun dress. She was plump and pale. God help him, it was Mélisande.

He knew who was in the river.

The girl picked up her clothes and ran to where the trees got thicker before dressing and loping home. The other made no effort to run; he did not even leave the river; rather, he just crouched to hide all but his head and languidly oared the water around him with his arms.

He was looking directly at the priest, who stood there for a long moment, torn between turning and walking home and trying to find something to say. Nothing occurred to him. He could not see the freckle in the boy’s eye, but he imagined it. He imagined more than that. Cloud shadows moved across the water, now darkening the lad’s head, now letting the moon paint it silver.

“Come in,” the boy said, so quietly that Père Matthieu convinced himself he had not heard it. He just opened his mouth and closed it again, like a landed fish trying to breathe.

“Come in,” the object of his affection said again.

“I can’t.”

“Père Matthieu can’t.”

“No.”

“So shed him with your clothes, and put him back on when you leave.”

“No.”

“That’s the beauty of being nude in a river; you’re nobody. You’re anybody you want to be. It’s just a dream.”

You used the same words to get the girl in there.

The priest opened and closed his mouth.

“Come in,” the boy said again.

And he did.

The Great Death got close in June, and the bridge leading to Paris was burned on the seigneur’s command. Little groups of armed farmers hid in the woods and frightened off those coming overland from
the other side; they soon found that the days off from farm labor were to their liking. They also found that, with no wives to nag them, they could drink all the beer and cider they cared to. They fashioned masks of river reeds and clay, raven’s feathers, and the teeth of foxes to make themselves terrifying, and also to remind them not to look anyone in the eyes—it was widely believed that the plague leapt from one man to another by means of a deadly beam from the eyes. They called themselves the Brotherhood of St. Martin’s Arse. They drank themselves into such a state of belligerence that even groups of strangers who agreed to turn around found themselves cudgeled so they would remember not to try again.

It was not long before they carried their antics back with them into town; Élise Planchette, the widow who ran the alehouse, soon learned to hate the hooting and boasts that announced the brotherhood’s return from patrol. Shutting the door was no good—they would keep at her until she opened it, then expect their drinks for free for their solemn work guarding the town from pestilence. Nearly every day they could be seen at the widow’s tables, dicing and carousing with their masks tipped back; those who watched by day came in the evening. Those who watched in the evening came by day. Their farms suffered as their wives and fathers took up the manuring and the weeding and the harrowing, but the men of the brotherhood had grown so fond of their newfound status as militiamen that there was no reasoning with them. The reeve could not make them work. The priest could not turn them away from their folly. Their number did shrink as some men, like Sanson Bertier, dropped out; but it grew again as bullies saw a way out of work.

When one of them stole wood from the widow’s house, saying his duties left him no time for chopping, she tried to block his way out but found herself pushed down on her backside. She complained to the herald. This herald promised to take the matter before their lord, but nothing was done. The seigneur, terrified of plague, had suspended court sessions and shut himself away with his retinue. Only the herald was seen, arching his painted eyebrows and reading unenforceable
proclamations from the back of his palfrey. Men-at-arms could be seen walking the parapet of the keep, their armor winking in the early summer light; but they never came down anymore. The Brotherhood of St. Martin’s Arse was all the justice there was in St. Martin-le-Preux.

One night, when there was enough moon, several of the day watch went drunkenly to the river to gather reeds for new members to make masks with. Steering for a growth of reeds near the charred and collapsed timber of the bridge, one of them noticed a pair of red stockings balled up on the shore. Other clothes were concealed nearby.

“Look here, boys,” he whispered, “we’ve got some June frolics in the river!”

“Ho,” one of them cried, slapping the water with his staff. “Come out, little fishes. One of you can show us her gills!”

They guffawed at that and began whistling, but no head broke the water.

“Under there,” one said, pointing at where the western ruin of the bridge still stood. They waded in the mud and looked underneath. There, hiding by the pilings, shivered a very pale and naked priest holding the hands of the reeve’s son, who was also in the state of Adam. Both of them were slicked with mud halfway up their shins.

“I don’t believe my whoring eyes,” one man said.

Now the boy panicked and sloshed out toward the other side of the bridge, running when he got to the bank. Père Matthieu nearly followed him, but then lost all hope. He turned his back to the men, held his face in his hands and cried.

He was sure they would kill him.

None of them moved for a long moment. Then one of them spat on him. Then another. When all of them had done so, they turned, laughing, and walked back up the river and into town to spread the news.

So it was that when the plague came, only a dozen souls were coming to Mass. Père Matthieu’s assistant and bell ringer, a stocky, busy, black-haired child everyone called Bourdon, performed his duties
without his former energy. Hardly any received the priest when he came to anoint their loved ones in death. Only a handful sought confession. Soon the reeve’s son died, and the reeve, and nearly the whole village. Heartbroken yet afraid for his life, the priest stopped going to church at all, shutting himself up in his house with his wine. It was not until the monster moved into the river that the villagers sought their shepherd out and shamed him into helping them. There was no one else they could go to. So he tried. He went house to house seeking men who could use a weapon. When he saw how strong the thing was and knew he did not have enough healthy men to fight it, he took up the place where the brotherhood used to wait, and sat with his lantern, praying for soldiers to come down the road.

As it turned out, one did.

As for the Brotherhood of St. Martin’s Arse, they were already gone. They were, in fact, among the first victims. The widow fell ill, having caught it from the farmer’s child who helped her clear up, and the surgeon had refused to see her. Trying to do for herself what she believed he would have done for her, she bled herself into a wooden bowl, though this only made her weaker. The lump in her groin was so painful that it was all she could do to drag herself down the stairs and to the alehouse door when, after one of her bleedings, the brotherhood pounded at it. They wore their masks. They stank of drink and were demanding more.

She told them to go away because she was tired.

They insisted.

She told them to go away, for the love of God.

They said they had none.

So she served them.

If they tasted the blood mixed into their beer, they never said a word about it.

FIFTEEN

“So I damned half my village. My weakness made them hate me, so they stayed away from Mass. They were cut off from the sacraments.”

Thomas furrowed his brow at the priest.

“But it doesn’t make sense. As you said yourself, most priests have a mistress. Why would they hate you so for dallying with the girl?”

The priest shook his head and looked at the sky.

“Why would the boy run off and leave the girl in the river with you? And why would she want a knobby old priest twice her age when she could have a handsome lad who was going to be a lawyer?”

“The mysteries of the heart are unknowable.”

“And the way you described his legs. It was the boy who stayed in the river, wasn’t it? Not the girl at all. You kept saying ‘the object of my affection’ because you plumbed the boy.”

“No,” the priest lied.

“What good is confession if you lie?”

“Everyone lies at confession. Around the edges, at least. A man who fornicates with his brother’s wife will say it was a whore. A
woman will say she was glad in her heart that her blind and deaf baby died, when what she means is that she drowned it. But I wasn’t lying. Because a man of war like you cannot travel with a known sodomite.”

“You’re goddamned right,” Thomas said.

“You need the object of my affection to have been the girl.”

“Yes.”

“So it was the girl.”

“Good. I hope you fucked her right in half.”

The priest smiled sadly and kept looking at the sky, though the moon was gone again, covered over with clouds. Thomas drank another swig of rainwater and went inside, mildly fuming.

“I wouldn’t leave you,” a small voice said. The priest looked down and saw that Delphine had come from the barn. “If it was the boy,” she continued. “I wouldn’t leave.”

He smiled at her and wiped at his eye with the back of his hand.

Then the rain came again and they all tried to sleep.

In the loft above the barn, a mouse had just peeled herself away from nursing her litter. She left them in the nest and went through a tunnel in the rotten hay, sensing that the rain had driven hosts of little bugs from the sodden ground and into the structure. It was the perfect time to hunt; ants or grubs would make better milk than grain, and there hadn’t been grain in this barn since before she birthed. As she got to the end of the tunnel, she stopped before she crossed the plain of planks that led to the beam she would skitter down to forage in the barn. She poked her nose into the air and sniffed. This was where an owl could most easily kill her, as one had had taken her mate on the path between the barn and the house. She smelled something, but it was no owl.